


There's a Greenswood Out in Flanders

by AMarguerite



Category: Maurice (1987), Maurice - E. M. Forster
Genre: M/M, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-28
Updated: 2016-03-28
Packaged: 2018-05-29 17:45:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6386095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/pseuds/AMarguerite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maurice and Alec get pulled out of the greenwood and into the mud of Flanders.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There's a Greenswood Out in Flanders

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [There's a Greenswood Out in Flanders](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11703210) by [Bug233](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bug233/pseuds/Bug233)



Over the top, groused Alec, flinging himself at Maurice instinctively, soon as the German guns sounded too close. Stupid bloody toffs. Why the hell go over the top when anyone with eyes in his head could see beforehand that it was going to be exactly like this? The line broken soon as it formed above ground, bullets coming so quick there weren't no way to plan for ‘em-- 

Alec knew. Alec could've told anyone this was what it would be like. He didn't have no illusions of glory or romance. 

Not like Maurice.

Daft, sweet thing he was.

Even now he looked surprised, as if there wasn't supposed to be bullets and barbed wire and everyone falling dead around ‘em both.

“You alright, Alec?”

“Peachy,” groused Alec. “Go over to the other side, they says. Easy!”

At least they've a chance to hold each other now. There hasn't been much of a chance for it since they were pulled out of the greenwood of England and flung into the mud of Flanders. Funny thing, thinks Alec, as they wait for the German guns to stop spitting at them. This sort of thing, if I got seen doing this at home, it's chokey and two years hard labor. Here it ain't nothing. Here there's half-a-dozen gents wishing I was looking out for them and not Maurice. It’d look odder if I weren't doing this for him, him the lieutenant and all.

“The captain will see we aren't advancing,” said Maurice, presently.

Alec looked to his right, where he captain had been, before the guns had found them. “The captain won't be seeing nothing, on account of him having no face no more.”

“Oh God,” said Maurice. 

Alec made a noise that could be read as agreement or disagreement, one of the most useful tricks he'd learnt working in a great house. 

“I suppose I shall have to call the retreat.”

“Best do,” advised Alec, and then, when that was done, issued orders himself. “Turn over like, so we can crawl back. Everyone's going back now. Running! The stupid bastards. Want to keep your head down just.”

“Right,” said Maurice, but soon as he shifted, there was a shell went off, too damn near. Alec felt Maurice’s arms, tight around him, and thought, ‘Better way to die than most.’ It was half-a-minute before he realized they weren’t dead, nor like to be-- from that shell, at least. His ears were ringing, and his eyes were dazzled, but all his parts was still attached. 

I’ve got more than a man’s usual measure of luck, Alec thought. He remained as pleased with this idea as he had been the first time it had occurred to him. It was a nice idea, and one that hadn’t worn out. Luck holding, it wouldn’t. And it was holding-- there was a foxhole. The shell had blasted apart some barbed wire. They could go through to it, easy. Well, easier than getting into the other trench, long as they didn't mind crawling through bits of other people.

“Maurice,” Alec said, and then again, because Maurice was still clinging to him, dazed, “Maurice!”

“The rest of the company is gone,” said Maurice, in his ear. “The rest of the company- that was- the shell- Alec, it's- I don't know how it is we’re alive.”

“Dunno,” said Alec. “Happens I want t’stay that way. There’s a foxhole. Come on.” The crawl weren't as bad as it could have been. He’d been muddier. It just didn't bear thinking of, what had wetted the dirt to mud. “Ain’t half a lark this,” he muttered to Maurice.

“They don’t tell you about this in the OTC at school,” agreed Maurice. Beneath the dabs of mud, his face was white and strained. “You sure you’re alright Alec?”

“I ain’t bleedin’.”

“Stay not bleeding,” said Maurice. “Stay not injured.”

“Order me about again, you would,” grumbled Alec. “Right when I’m half-drowning in mud, retreating on your orders.”

“It’s what the lieutenant’s pips say I can do,” said Maurice, but then he leaned over and kissed Alec’s forehead, muddy and sweaty as it was, just under the brim of his tin hat. “I like it better when you give me orders.”

“Too right,” said Alec, but it had put him in a better mood than he’d been in before. It had galled him, it had, when they’d gotten their call up papers and Maurice got whisked away to different training, all because of the life he’d had before they’d met. Alec didn’t like that old life claiming Maurice again. The toffs, they were always taking from men like Alec. They’d take back Maurice forever, if they could.

Still in this mindset, Alec was disgusted to see the foxhole was already occupied. A lieutenant in khaki, underneath all the mud, was crouched there, trying to pull a bandage tight on his hand.

Maurice saluted. Alec slauted too, but it was surly. 

“What ho there,” said the lieutenant. “Please crawl on in. Bit out of mess out there at present.”

“You can bloody well say that,” muttered Alec. 

“Guns still going?” As if he were asking about the bloody weather. What right ijits they made into officers. 

“Yes, frightfully close,” said Maurice, as they crawled into the hole. It weren't a bad dug out. No water filling it, and the entrance facing their own trench, and the lieutenant had cigarettes he offered round. Alec wanted the brandy Maurice liked and had gotten him to like, but tobacco would do. They sat and had a smoke while the guns was too loud for speaking to be easy. When the guns had quieted themselves a bit, the lieutenant talked to Maurice, asking his name and company and all.

Private Scudder weren't of no interest. Alec wasn't sure if he was annoyed about being made to feel like furniture again, like he had at Penge, or annoyed this toffee-nosed prat was talking to Maurice. Maurice was strong, he was, but he'd been on watch afore the captain said they was all to go over and now Maurice was tired, and Maurice  _ had  _ been closing his eyes to sleep a little before this ass went and asked, “Are you an Oxford man?”

Like that bloody mattered when you was crouched in a bloody hole in the ground with shells and bombs and things going off overhead.

Maurice said, tiredly, “No, Cambridge.”

The lieutenant nodded. “I just took my First in English before they gave me the pips. I thought- well, didn't expect to be here a full year. Though I was devilish proud to go and sign up and prove my worth to old Blighty.”

“Nawt but lies, all that,” said Alec, settling in for a good army grouse. “Be gone by Christmas. Laugh!”

The lieutenant smiled weakly. “Not  _ quite  _ how it turned out. Did you think it'd be a short war, Lieutenant Hall?”

“He don't much think,” Alex wanted to say, fond and teasing and meaning ‘he's mine, he don't know what you're doing, pulling him back towards you and away from me, but I do, so leave off!’

Maurice said, pressing the side of his arm to Alec’s. “I don't much think. I’m almost constantly in a muddle. I didn't volunteer for this war, you see. I didn't want it. It seemed a worse muddle than the ones I’m usually in.”

That was near as good as Alec saying something himself. Alec grinned, pulling in on his cigarette. God it was sweet, times like this, when they was one mind. Made it easier that they couldn't be one body, not in all the mud, with everyone around them.

“Oh? What did you do before the war, Lieutenant Hall?”

“I was a stockbroker and an accountant, before this.” Maurice closed his eyes. “I don't miss it. I do miss the country. I miss that awfully.”

“What,” asked the lieutenant, playfully, “you don't wish you were in the City now, answering telephones, instead of sitting in this lovely, lovely foxhole?”

Maurice shifted, but didn't answer.

It had been harder for Maurice to chuck his job. It was still a problem he couldn’t clearly speak about. Alec understood, or sort of did. He understood enough to understand two things, straight off:

  1. Long as Alec had the woods and Maurice, he had what he needed.
  2. Maurice had lots of things he didn’t need, but thought he did, and didn’t know how to sort out the two. 



At first Maurice thought one of the things he didn’t need was money, but Alec set him right on that one. Alec liked having money, and knew Maurice didn’t know what to do without it. Nothing like poverty, Alec had pointed out, to make two people hate each other. Not that Alec had ever been poor neither. Butcher’s sons didn’t starve. Much as he loved Maurice, he wasn’t going to starve, if it was something he didn’t have to do.

In the end, Maurice had decided since he didn’t know what a stockbroker could possibly do in the woods, he might as well buy a cottage and let Alec get started setting everything up. The cottage was what Maurice called “nicely situated,” a half-hour’s walk from a village with a train station, and only one family of toffs, who were unlikely to know Maurice. Alec liked it. Their nearest neighbor was the wood. He could vanish for hours there, setting traps, or just walking or sitting or even wanking, and no one to tell him, “Scudder, do this!” or ask him, “Where the devil have you been, Scudder?” Even when Maurice came down for good-- it wasn’t a wholesale chucking, since he still had investments of some kind, but he didn’t have to go to the city anymore-- it was only a kiss and a “Hello Alec, I was just wishing for you.”

He could live with that. He could live with that easy. It was sweeter than words could say, to live with that.

“What were you in civil life, private?” asked the lieutenant, politely, when it became clear Maurice wasn’t going to answer. 

“Gamekeeper,” said Alec, shortly. It was better than ‘poacher’ which was more-or-less what he did when he didn’t feel like cutting wood, or taking on odd jobs from the local farmers. There weren’t no shame in poaching. A man who knew how to poach without getting caught was respected, by the right sorts. But toffs never were the right sorts. Except Maurice. But Maurice was different from everyone else in the world. Alec had always known  _ that _ . He pressed his shoulder against Maurice’s. The shells was gone, but the guns picked up.

The other toff sunk into flinching silence. Alec thought vaguely of the village. Maurice was always muddled about what the people in the village knew. Alec  _ knew  _ what they knew, and wasn’t bothered. Maurice was Alec Scudder’s toff. And that was that.

Well, it was more than that, but that’s all anyone thought now. Alec had been in the cottage first, and been proud to tell everyone this was his house, what he’d managed to get with a little luck. So everyone thought he’d got a legacy from an employer what died, or an uncle what left him some money, or (as his mother and father and brothers thought), he'd buggered off to the races when he'd gone up to London on a whim, after quitting work at Penge, and won himself enough to chuck the Argentine and buy some land in England. His family thought it was just one of auld Alec’s no-thought choices. He'd always been impulsive. Course if he won a packet he was going to go off and make it so he didn't have to work and make something of himself, and inconvenience everyone in the whole ruddy family thereby. But that was Alec for you, and their letters stopped being angry when they realized Alec actually did have a house, and wasn’t off begging and living rough somewhere.

The people in the village didn't know him well enough to think ‘that’s auld Alec for you,’ but they approved of him and his cottage as common sense. If anyone of them had a legacy or luck at the races, they’d buy land and a cottage too. And if they thought he was high and mighty over having a cottage what with electricity and a water closet (Maurice was that fussy, he was) and Alec not being near thirty, yet, they all let it fall when they heard Alec had to rent out a room to some toff who couldn’t stick it with London and moved out to the country (understandable, agreed most of the patrons of the local. They’d been country born and bred and didn’t hold with cities). Overreached himself, our Alec, the patrons of the local said. Happens with these young men, not knowing how much they need to live on, after they buy themselves some land. Good on him, getting a toff to rent a room. Probably charges him more than it’s worth. 

People in the village had all been suspicious of Maurice at first, until he started doing accounts for the local squire. Then they could slot him neatly into the right place. It was always like that in villages. You were who you lived with and worked with, and if it didn’t fit a body’s notions of what it should be, it caused trouble. But if Maurice did things with numbers in the great house and was assumed to pay for a room in Alec’s cottage, no one asked questions. He was Alec’s toff what looked over accounts at the great house. That was that.

“Hi,” said Maurice, startling out of sleep on a note of alarm, as their dugout got shelled.

“Shh, only shells, just,” said Alec, drawing him close and fuck the lieutenant. 

Maurice curled around Alec and, pushing up his hat, buried his face against the side of Alec’s muddy neck.

Alec glared at the lieutenant, daring him to say anything. 

The lieutenant offered a friendly smile, strained more from the shelling than seeing them close. He said something in some language what wasn’t English. Sounded like the language Maurice used sometimes, when they went up to London to see the British Museum. Alec liked that museum. Even if he was angry or annoyed when he got there, he didn’t stay that way once he got in and was looking at all them fine old things, what was left over from people long in their graves. That was quality, that. 

Maurice looked up a little, tin hat digging into Alec’s cheek. He said something in that old language and said, “Though it’s hardly likely they’d make up a Sacred Band these days, is it?”

“A what?” Alec asked.

“The Sacred Band of Thebes,” said Maurice, realizing that his hat was digging into Alec’s face and shifting. The ground juttered around them; dirt rained tinnily onto their heads. “Something they had in ancient Greece.”

“Like them statues of Elgin’s.”

“That’s right. It--” He had to wait for the noise of nearer shell to pass. “An army of lovers.”

“What, women too?”

“No, just men.”

Alec threw back his head and nearly hooted with laughter. He’d’ve paid a shilling to see that. Paid the king’s shilling, even.

“Things were different then,” said the other lieutenant, drawing his knees to his chin and his arms round his legs. “Better.”

“What, you got someone then?” Alec asked, surprised and pleased. 

“Had.” The lieutenant jerked his chin out and up, towards No Man’s Land. 

Maurice said, quietly, “I’m awfully sorry.”

Alec’s condolences were more profane, but did better justice to his feelings. 

“Yes, quite,” said the lieutenant. “But it’s-- it’s necessary you know. He went out a hero. And it’s what we’re good for, what the Greeks said we’re good for. Fighting better than normal men. It always gave me a sort of comfort, once I got here. Thinking I’d a place here and surely that would mean having a place back in England again if I acquitted myself honorably-- as honorably as the Sacred Band might have done.”

“But we haven't no need to fight to have England,” said Alec. Toffs lost half their soft heads when they was thinking about honor. “England's ours. It ought to be. We was born there.”

“So in spite of all temptations,” sang the lieutenant, “to belong to other nations- he remains an Englishman! He remains an Englishman.”

“You daft?” Alec wanted to ask. Instead he asked, “They hit you in the head, the shells and things?”

“No, it's just Gilbert and Sullivan,” said the lieutenant.

“They get it from the guns?” Sometimes grief gave people queer turns. There was half-a-dozen ballads Alec knew where a lady went madly about singing when she'd lost her lover or her family or summat. 

“No it--” the lieutenant decided to stop being mad, or at least, hid it better, and said, “I say, the guns are silent. Shall we make a sortie?”

“You daft?” Alec actually asked this time. “This hour of the night? They hasn’t stopped firing yet. It’s reloading, that’s all it is.”

The lieutenant gave him a disapproving look. “Lieutenant Hall?”

But Maurice was in a muddle again. “Oh I don’t know.”

“Be brave, man,” said the lieutenant, appalled.

“We’s bin fighting the past six-month,” said Alec, indignant. “There’s brave and there’s stupid, and you learn the difference reet quick. Stupid to go out just now, with the guns as hot as they is.”

“Cleverness is often just a pleasanter word for cowardice,” said the lieutenant, frostily.

“No it ain’t,” said Alec. He’d had some schooling. He knew synonyms. Being clever was also being smart, or being witty (as was said in the great houses of the world), or being resourceful. Didn’t have nothing to do with cowardice. Choosing battles, not avoiding them, that was a ticket. 

“I shan’t waste the quiet arguing with you,” said the lieutenant. “Come along, Hall.”

“Thanks, but no,” said Maurice, in sudden decision.  

“Lieutenant Hall--”

“He can’t give you no orders,” muttered Alec. “He’s same rank as you.”

“I trust Private Scudder’s assessment,” said Maurice, in his old, posh tones, the sort he’d used when asking Alec if five shillings weren’t enough of a tip. Alec grinned to hear it used on someone else. “I shall wait here, at present. Godspeed, lieutenant.”

“Our place is on the battlefield, proving by our example our usefulness to the state and to society,” said the lieutenant, suddenly, stiffly. “By God, if death’s all you fear, better go out fighting than crouching here like a-- like a fox in its den.”

“Foxes is clever,” said Alec, forebearing to add that toffs was always driving foxes from their dens for no good reason. The lieutenant didn’t hear him, or pretended not to. 

“Come out and fight, man!”

“I do, every day of my life,” said Maurice, starting to get bullish. 

The lieutenant made an exasperated noise and darted out, quick as a hound released on the hunt. Maurice didn’t move.

“Rest your head on me more, the way you like,” said Alec, feeling magnanimous in his victory. “Different ways of fighting, ain’t it. Enough to survive, for me.”

“I can’t think clearly and theoretically enough to be a matryr,” agreed Maurice, drowsing contentedly on Alec’s chest, or as best he could without taking off the tin hat. “It’s a different way of fighting,  _ not  _ laying down your life and dying. But trying to live-- really live. It takes greater courage to live as we have than anything else in my life ever did.”

The guns went off again.

“See?” said Alec, though he knew he didn’t need to.

“Hope he got back safely,” said Maurice, suddenly awake again. “He was so sure the battlefield was where he was supposed to be.”

“What he was saying isn’t the case. For us, I mean.”

“No? Why not?”

“Cause Maurice,” said Alec, “this ain’t where we’re supposed to be. You hear me? It’s the greenwoods, us.” And he dug out the talisman he had kept superstitiously wrapped in with his tobacco and pressed it into his hand. “You and me. In the forest.”

Maurice felt tremblingly the acorn in his cracked, dirty palms. “Did you bring it with you, Alec?”

Stupid question, but Alec could hear in the tone, the great underlying desire for reassurance. “Course I did, you daftie. Brought it for you as much as me. Though it’s nearabouts the same, ain’t it. What’s for me is what’s for you.”

“And that’s the greenwood,” said Maurice. 

“He’s got it!” Alec offered a grin he knew to be particularly cheeky. 

“Yes,” said Maurice, both arms about him. “I do.”

  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> The title's a not-very-creative riff on the WWI song, "There's a Green Hill Out in Flanders." Alec's probably heard of "Gilbert and Sullivan," but I thought he probably wasn't going to be making associative jumps to light operetta while trapped in No Man's Land- hopefully the joke's funny enough so that if it is implausible, I can be forgiven.


End file.
